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Category: Mobile World Congress

Looking back on 2023 with the XPRTs

Around the beginning of each new year, we like to take the opportunity to look back and summarize the XPRT highlights from the previous year. Readers of our newsletter are familiar with the stats and updates we include each month, but for our blog readers who don’t receive the newsletter, we’ve compiled highlights from 2023 below.

Benchmarks
In March, we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of WebXPRT! WebXPRT 4 has now taken the lead as the most commonly-used version of WebXPRT, even as the overall number of runs has continued to grow.

XPRTs in the media
Journalists, advertisers, and analysts referenced the XPRTs thousands of times in 2023. It’s always rewarding to know that the XPRTs have proven to be useful and reliable assessment tools for technology publications around the world. Media sites that used the XPRTs in 2023 include 3DNews (Russia), AnandTech, Benchlife.info (China), CHIP.pl (Poland), ComputerBase (Germany), eTeknix, Expert Reviews, Gadgetrip (Japan), Gadgets 360, Gizmodo, Hardware.info, IT168.com (China), ITC.ua (Ukraine), ITWorld (Korea), iXBT.com (Russia), Lyd & Bilde (Norway), Notebookcheck, Onchrome (Germany), PCMag, PCWorld, QQ.com (China), Tech Advisor, TechPowerUp, TechRadar, Tom’s Guide, TweakTown, Yesky.com (China), and ZDNet.

Downloads and confirmed runs
In 2023, we had more than 16,800 benchmark downloads and 296,800 confirmed runs. Users have run our most popular benchmark, WebXPRT, more than 1,376,500 times since its debut in 2013! WebXPRT continues to be a go-to, industry-standard performance benchmark for OEM labs, vendors, and leading tech press outlets around the globe.

Trade shows
In January, Justin attended the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Las Vegas. In March, Mark attended Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona. You can view Justin’s recap of CES here and Mark’s thoughts from MWC here.

We’re thankful for everyone who used the XPRTs and sent questions and suggestions throughout 2023. We’re excited to see what’s in store for the XPRTs in 2024!

Justin

Mobile World Congress 2023: Infrastructure led the way

When the tech industry is at its best, a virtuous cycle of capabilities and use cases chases its own tail to produce ever-better tech for us all. Faster CPUs drive new usage models, which in turn emerge and swamp the CPUs, which then must get faster. Better screens make us want higher-quality video, which requires more bandwidth to deliver and causes us to desire even better displays. Apps connect us in more ways, but those connections require more bandwidth, which leads to new apps that can take advantage of those faster connections. And on and on.

Put a finger on the cycle at any given moment, and you’ll see that while all the elements are in motion, some are the stars of the moment. To keep the cycle going, it’s crucial for these areas to improve the most. At Mobile World Congress 2023 (#MWC23), that distinction belonged to infrastructure. Yes, some new mobile phones were on display, Lenovo showed off new ThinkPads, and other mobile devices were in abundance, but as I walked the eight huge halls, I couldn’t help but notice the heavy emphasis on infrastructure.

5G, for example, is real now—but it’s far from everywhere. Telecom providers have to figure out how to profitably build out the networks necessary to support it. The whole industry must solve the problems of delivering 5G at huge scale, handle the traffic increases it will bring, switch and route the data, and ultimately make sure the end devices can take full advantage of that data. Management and security remain vital whenever data is flying around, so those softer pieces of infrastructure also matter greatly.

Inevitably and always, to know if we as an industry are meeting these challenges, we must measure performance—both in the raw speed sense and in the broader sense of the word. Are we seeing the full bandwidth we expect? Are devices handling the data properly and at speed? Where’s the bottleneck now? Are we delivering on the schedules we promised? Questions such as these are key concerns in every tech cycle—and some of them are exactly what the XPRTs focus on.

As we improve our infrastructure, we hope to see the benefits at a personal level. When you’re using a device—whether it’s a smart watch, a mobile phone, or a laptop—you need it to do its job well, respond to you quickly, and show you what you want when you want it. When your device makes you wait, it can be helpful to know if the bandwidth feeding data to the device is the bottleneck or if the device simply can’t keep up with the flow of data it’s receiving. The XPRTs can help you figure out what’s going on, and they will continue to be useful and important as the tech cycle spins on. If history is our guide, the infrastructure focus of MWC23 will lead to greater capabilities that require even better devices down the line. We look forward to testing them.

The XPRTs will be at Mobile World Congress later this month!

Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 kicks off on February 27th, and we’re excited that Mark Van Name will be attending the event for the first time since the last pre-pandemic show in 2019. Each year, MWC offers a great opportunity to examine the new trends and technologies that will shape mobile technology in the years to come. The major themes of this year’s show include the latest advances in 5G and IoT technologies, along with what GSMA is calling “Reality+.” Reality+ refers to the intersection of AI, AR, VR, and 5G, and the potential impacts of these immersive technologies on our future.

Mark will be sharing his thoughts from this year’s show here in the XPRT blog, so be sure to stayed tuned. Will you be attending MWC this year? If so, let us know!

Justin

MWCS18 and AIXPRT: a new video

A few weeks ago, Bill shared his first impressions from this year’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai (MWCS). “5G +” was the major theme, and there was a heavy emphasis on 5G + AI. This week, we published a video about Bill’s MWCS experience and the role that the XPRTs can play in evaluating emerging technologies such as 5G, AI, and VR. Check it out!

MWC Shanghai 2018: 5G, AI, VR, and the XPRTs

 

You can read more about AIXPRT development here. We’re still accepting responses to the AIXPRT Request for Comments, so if you would like to share your ideas on developing an AI/machine learning benchmark, please feel free to contact us.

Justin

 

MWC18 and technology on the brink

This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona bristled with technologies on the brink of superstardom.  The long-awaited 5G high-speed mobile standard again dominated the conversations, and is one year closer to creating a world of high-speed connections that will make possible mobile usages we’ve only begun to discover.  Intelligent, connected cars promise a self-driving and highly interconnected automotive experience that should ultimately make driving better for all of us.  Artificial intelligence, already a star, showed glimmers of its vast and still barely tapped potential.  In keeping with the show’s name, mobile devices of all sorts proved that phones and tablets and laptops are nowhere near done, with new models and capabilities available all over the many halls that comprised the MWC campus.

Each of those technologies will continue to evolve rapidly over the coming years, and each will create new opportunities for us all to benefit.  Those opportunities will appear both in ways we understand now—faster connections and quicker devices, for example—and in fashions we don’t yet understand.  The new benefits will lead to new usage models, change the ways we interact with the world, and create whole new markets.  (When the first smartphones appeared, they changed photography forever, but that wasn’t their primary goal.)  These new technologies will help us in ways we can now only glimpse.

These changes and new capabilities will breed both competition and, inevitably, confusion.  How are we to know which of the new products deliver the best implementations of these technologies heading toward stardom, and how are we to know when to upgrade to new generations of these products?

Answering those questions, and clarifying some of the confusing aspects of the always shifting tech market, are the reasons the XPRT community and tools exist.  New tech creates new usage models that require new tools to assess–XPRT tools.

If there’s one last lesson I learned from MWC18, it’s that our work is only just beginning.  The new technologies that are on the brink today will become superstars soon, and we’ll be there with the tools you need to assess and compare them.

Mark

WebXPRT 3, Mobile World Congress, and the next HDXPRT

We’re excited about everything that’s in store for the XPRTs, and we want to update community members on what to expect in the next few months.

The next major development is likely to be the WebXPRT 3 general release. We’re currently refining the UI and conducting extensive testing with the community preview build. We’re not ready to announce a firm release date, but hope to do so over the next few weeks. Please try the community preview and give us your feedback, if you haven’t already.

During the last week of February, Mark will be at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Each year, MWC offers a great opportunity to examine the new trends and technologies that will shape mobile technology in the years to come. We look forward to sharing Mark’s thoughts on this year’s hot topics. Will you be attending MWC this year? If so, let us know!

In addition, we’re hoping to have a community preview of the next HDXPRT ready in the spring. As we mentioned a few months ago, we’re updating the workloads, applications, and UI. For the converting photos scenario, we’re considering incorporating new Adobe Photoshop tools such as the “Open Closed Eyes” feature and an automatic fix for pictures that are out of focus due to handheld camera shake. For the converting videos scenario, we’re including 4K GoPro footage that represents the quality of video captured by today’s “prosumer” demographic.

What features would you like to see in the next HDXPRT? Let us know!

Justin

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